David Lang

David Lang (born January 8, 1957 in Los Angeles, California) is an American composer. Together with Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon, Lang co-founded Bang on a Can in 1987. His first recognition came from the BMI Foundation's Student Composer Awards in 1980 and 1981.

He can be seen as a composer who challenges the status quo. He sometimes gives his concert pieces strange, and even iconoclastic titles such as Eating Living Monkeys (1985) and Bonehead (1990). His music can be in turn: comic, abrasive, soothing and it usually retains elements of conceptualism. It is also informed by modernism, minimalism, and rock -- and can perhaps be best described by the term post-minimalism.

He was a major contributor to the string quartet music, performed by Kronos Quartet, in the film Requiem for a Dream (2000).

In 1999 he collaborated with composers Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon, and librettist/illustrator Ben Katchor, in the composition of the "comic strip opera" The Carbon Copy Building. The production won an Obie Award for Best New American Production.

"David Lang" is also the name of a character in a commonly cited vanishing hoax. In this story, first printed in Fate Magazine in 1953 by journalist Stuart Palmer, a man named "David Lang" was walking across a field on September 23, 1880 when he vanished mid-step and in full view of others. The article was later determined be a hoax inspired by a short story published in 1909 by Ambrose Bierce. In 1999, the composer David Lang based his opera "The Difficulty of Crossing a Field" on this Bierce story . [1]

Lang holds degrees from Stanford University, the University of Iowa, and Yale University (DMA, 1989). His teachers have included Richard Hervig, Jacob Druckman, Hans Werner Henze, and Martin Bresnick.

Lang's music has been released on the Argo/Decca, BMG, Cantaloupe Music, Chandos, CRI, Point, and Sony Classical labels. His scores are published by Red Poppy Music (available from G. Schirmer, Inc.)

His notable students include Kevin Puts.